In a typical corporate information technology and/or computing arrangement, a host owned by a corporation may be assigned to an employee of the corporation for use by the employee in carrying out the employee's work for the corporation. In this typical arrangement, the host executes an operating system and comprises mass storage. The employee may issue, via the operating system's user interface, data storage and retrieval requests to the host. In response to such data storage and retrieval requests, data may be stored in, and retrieved from, respectively, the mass storage by the host. In this conventional arrangement, the data is stored in, and retrieved from, the mass storage as plaintext. In order to validate the employee's authorization to store data in and/or retrieve data from the mass storage, prior to permitting the employee to issue the data storage and/or retrieval requests to the host via the operating system, the operating system may require the employee to furnish, during a user log-in process, a valid user password.
In this typical arrangement, the employee has possession of the host. However, if an unauthorized person gains access to the host, the unauthorized person may be able to remove the mass storage from the host. Thereafter, the unauthorized person may be able to couple the mass storage to another host, and issue data storage and retrieval requests to the mass storage via the other host's operating system. Unfortunately, since, in this conventional arrangement, the data is stored in, and retrieved from the mass storage as plaintext, this may permit the unauthorized person to be able to retrieve data from and/or modify the data in the mass storage, despite the fact that the unauthorized person lacks the company's authorization to do so.
One proposed solution has been to use the host's operating system to encrypt, based on an encryption key generated by the operating system, the data stored in the mass storage. For example, using the key, the operating system may, in response to an authorized user's data storage request, encrypt plaintext data and store the thus encrypted data in the mass storage. Likewise, using the key, the operating system may, in response to an authorized user's data retrieval request, retrieve encrypted data from the mass storage and decrypt the encrypted data to produce plaintext data to be presented to the user. However, after initially authorizing an employee's access to the data stored in the mass storage, the corporation later may desire to restrict the employee's access to the data. Unfortunately, since data encryption and decryption is performed by the operating system, the employee has possession of the host and its mass storage, and the employee presumably still has knowledge of a valid operating system user password, unless and until the corporation regains possession from the employee of the mass storage, the employee may continue to access the data stored in the mass storage, via the operating system. Thus, this proposed solution may be unable to provide sufficient data security.